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One of the other things I’ve learned as a social scientist And I’ve been warned about this by I would say great social scientists that You want to be very careful about Doing large-scale experimentation with large-scale systems because the probability that if you implement a Scheme in a large-scale social system that that scheme will have the result you intended is negligible What will happen will be something that you don’t intend and even worse something that works at counter purposes to your original intent and so and that that makes sense because If you have a very very complex system, and you perturb it The probability that you can predict the consequence of the perturbation is extraordinary low obviously If the system works though you think you understand it because it works And so you think it’s simpler than it actually is and so then you think that your model of it is correct And then you think that your manipulation of the model which produces Outcome you model will be the outcome that’s actually produced in the world that doesn’t work at all I Thought about that an awful lot Thinking about how to remediate social systems because obviously they need Careful attention and adjustment, and it struck me that the proper Strategy for implementing social change is to stay within your domain of competence and That requires humility which is a virtue that is never Promoted in modern culture. I would say it’s it’s a virtue that you can hardly even talk about But humility means you’re probably not as smart as you think you are and you should be careful And so then the question might be well, okay You should be careful, but perhaps you still want to do good you want to make some positive changes How can you be careful and do good and then I would say well you try not to step outside of the boundaries of your Competence and you start small and you start with things that you actually could adjust that you actually do understand that you actually could fix I mentioned to you at one point that one of the things Carl Jung said was that Modern men don’t see God because they don’t look low enough. It’s a very interesting phrase and one of the things that I’ve been promoting I suppose Online is the idea that You should restrict your attempts to fix things To what’s at hand So there’s probably things about you that you could fix right things that you know that aren’t right Not anyone else’s opinion your own opinion that aren’t right you can fix them Maybe there’s some things that you could adjust in your family Well that gets hard You have to have your act together a lot before you can start to adjust your family because things can kick back on you Really hard and you think well, it’s hard to put yourself together. It’s really hard to put your family together Why the hell do you think you can put the world together? Right because obviously the world is more complicated than you and your family And so if you if you’re stymied in your attempts even to set your own house in order Which of course you are then you would think that what that would do would be to make you very very leery about Announcing your broad-scale plans for social revolution Well, it’s a peculiar thing because that isn’t how it works because people are much more likely to announce their plans for broad-scale social revolution Then they are to try to set themselves straight or to set their family straight And I think the reason for that is that as soon as they try to set themselves straight or their families the system immediately Kicks back at them right instantly whereas if they announce their plans for large-scale social revolution The lag between the announcement and the kickback is so long that they don’t recognize that There’s any error there and so you know you can get away with being wrong if if if nothing falls on you for a while and So and it’s also an incitement to hubris because you can now see your Your plans for large-scale social revolution and stand back, and you don’t get hit by lightning And you think well I might be right even though you’re not you’re seriously not right I might be right and then you think well How wonderful is that especially if you could do it without any real effort, and I really do think Fundamentally I believe that that’s what universities teach students now That’s what they teach them to do I really believe that I think it’s absolutely appalling And I think it’s horribly dangerous Because it’s not that easy to fix things especially if you don’t well, especially if you’re not committed to it and I think you know if you’re committed because what you try to do is you try to straighten out your own life first And that’s enough like there’s a I think it’s a statement in the New Testament that it’s I think it’s in the New Testament that It’s more difficult to rule yourself than to rule the city And that’s not a metaphor. It’s like all of you who’ve made announcements to yourself about Changing your diet and going to the gym every January know perfectly well how difficult it is to regulate your own impulses and to bring yourself under the control of some What would you say well structured and Ethical attentive structure of values It’s extraordinarily difficult and so people don’t do it and then instead they wander off and I think they create towers of babble and The story indicates well those things collapse under their own weight and everyone goes their own direction I Think I see that happening with the LGBT community I Think because one of the things I’ve noticed it’s very interesting because the community is is some sense it’s not a community, but That’s a technical error, but it’s it’s composed of outsiders. Let’s say and what you notice across the decades is that the acronym list keeps growing and I think that’s because there’s an infinite number of ways to be an outsider And so once you open the door to the construction of a group that’s characterized by Failing to fit into the group then you immediately create a category that’s infinitely expandable And so I don’t know how long the acronym list is now it depends on which acronym list you consult but I’ve seen lists of ten or more acronyms and one of the things that’s happening is that The community is starting to fragment In its in its interior because there is no unity Once you put a sufficient plurality under the sheltering structure of a single umbrella say The disunity starts to appear within and I think that’s also a It’s a manifestation of the same issue that this particular story is dealing with So that ends I would say the most archaic stories in the in the Bible There’s something about the flood story and and also the Tower of Babel I think they outline the two fundamental dangers that beset mankind one is the probability that Blindness and sin will produce a natural catastrophe or entice one That’s something modern people are very aware of in principle right because they’re very aware of the fact that Because we’re all hyper concerned about environmental degradation and catastrophe and so That’s the continual Reactivation of an archetypal idea in our in our unconscious minds that there’s something about the way we’re living It’s unsustainable and that will create a catastrophe it’s so interesting because people believe that firmly and deeply and But they don’t see the relationship between that and the archetypal stories because it’s the same story Over consumption greed all of that is producing an unstable state and nature will rebel and take us down Right you hear that every day in every newspaper and every TV station. It’s broadcast to you constantly And so that idea is presented in in Genesis in the story of Noah and then the other Warning that exists in the stories one is beware of natural catastrophe That’s produced as a consequence of blindness and greed will say the other is beware of Social structures that overreach Because they’ll also produce fragmentation and disintegration and so it’s quite remarkable. I think that that With at the close of the story of the Tower of Babel we’ve got both of the permanent existential dangers that Present themselves to humanity already identified